If the A18 Pro has the same ISA as the M-series chips then this may not be so straightforward. I am still hanging on to my 2020 Intel MBP for dear life because it is the only Apple device I own that allows me to run Ubuntu and Windows 11 on a VirtualBox VM.
Would you elaborate what you mean by saying Linux on an M-series chip isn't straightforward? That's not been my experience, I (and lots of other devs) use it every day, Apple supports Linux via [0], and provides the ability to use Rosetta 2 within VMs to run legacy x86 binaries?
Clearly I'm not as knowledgable about this as I thought I was. I already have a Ubuntu x86 VM running on an Intel Mac (inside VirtualBox). Same with Windows 11. Can this tool allow me to run both VMs in an Apple Silicon device in a performant way? Last I checked VirtualBox on Apple Silicon only permits the running of ARM64 guests.
While I have a preference for VirtualBox I'd say I'm hypervisor agnostic. Really any way I can get this to work would be super intriguing to me.
> Can this tool allow me to run both VMs in an Apple Silicon device in a performant way?
I use VMWare Fusion on an M1 Air to run ARM Windows. Windows is then able to run Windows x86-64 executables I believe through it's own Rosetta 2 like implementation. The main limitation is that you cannot use x86-64 drivers.
Similarly, ARM Linux VMs can use Rosetta 2 to run x86-64 binaries with excellent performance. For that I mostly use Rancher or podman which setup the Linux VM automatically and then use it to run Linux ARM containers. I don't recall if I've tried to run x86-64 Linux binaries inside an Linux ARM container. It might be a little trickier to get Rosetta 2 to work. It's been a long time since I tried to run a Linux x86-64 container.
Not until macOS 28., but you're right, it's frustratingly unclear whether the initial deprecation is limited to macOS apps or whether it will also stop working for VMs.
This can be avoided by not upgrading to MacOS 28 right? I'm new to Mac's and the Apple release schedule so I'm not sure how mandatory the annual updates are.
You can just splat whatever support files it needs into the VM there isn't anything special about them. In fact you can copy them onto a different (non-Mac) device and use them there too
The instruction set is not the issue, the issue is on ARM there's no standardized way like on x86 to talk to specialized hardware, so drivers must be reimplemented with very little documentation.
As long as you're ok with arm64 guests, you can absolutely run both Ubuntu and Win11 VMs on M-series CPUs. Parallels also supports x86 guests via emulation.
How is the performance when emulating the x86 architecture via parallels?
Also is it possible to convert an existing x86 VM to arm64 or do I just have to rebuild all of my software from scratch? I always had the perception that the arm64 versions of Windows & Ubuntu have inferior support both in terms of userland software and device drivers.
